Airlines Could Be Tracking Their International Flights (Cheaply) By Summer, If Only...

Dan Reed
, ContributorI write about airlines, the travel biz, and related industriesOpinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

It’s been a year since Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared, literally, from the planet, and the world’s aviation safety authorities continue to move at relatively glacial pace to implement a new system to track airplanes’ positions virtually anywhere in the world (even after their transponders are turned off, as happened on MH370).

The International Civil Aviation Organization, the U.N. agency that attempts to set operational, legal and safety standards for airlines around the globe, has called on national aviation authorities to mandate the use of existing technology to automatically report planes’ positions every 15 minutes – or even minute by minute if certain threatening conditions exist. But there’s considerable debate about whether such a rule will be implemented by all nations by the Nov. 2016 target date set by ICAO. There’s also questions about who will pay for what many assume will be a very expensive solution to a problem that, though devastating when it happens, remains very rare.

But a Denver-based aviation consultant and retired international airline captain says most airlines - including U.S. giants American, Delta and United, and all the leading foreign carriers - that fly long-haul international routes could implement such a tracking system by this summer, and do so for less than $1 million a year per carrier in additional spending. What’s more, he says, that modest expense would more than pay for itself by helping carriers shave time off flights, reduce delays, provide better service, and attract the loyalty of more and happier passengers.

“All you would need is software that would alert someone whenever there’s a deviation from the flight plan or some other issue that causes a plane not to be where it’s expected to be. The cost of that likely is only about $50,000 a month,” says Michael Baiada, president of ATH Group. “ It’s not an exorbitant expense at all for companies that operate dozens, even hundreds of international range wide body jets that cost $150 million or more each.

Baiada retired late year from United Airlines, where he captained Boeing 747s on international routes – the kind of routes where accurately tracking the positions of aircraft in real time commonly is not done because those planes spend most of their time flying beyond the range of ground-based radar. As president of ATH Group Baiada has sought, largely unsuccessfully, to convince airlines that they can dramatically improve their on-time performance and other service quality performance items by applying Peter Drucker-inspired “operational excellence” managerial techniques and technologies. That's a tough sell to an industry that long has accepted, largely without question, that failing to provide what their customers most value - an on-time arrival - 30 percent of the time is not only acceptable but actually relatively good performance.

Tracking flights, he says, should be a part of every airline’s efforts to achieve operational excellence. Doing that would allow them to dramatically reduce costly delays and improve their brand image - and their bottom lines. “All it will take is for one carrier to adopt an operational excellence approach and it will be so popular with consumer and shareholders that all other airlines will be forced to follow,” Baiada says.

Being able to track all of their aircraft in near-real time would be a fortunate by-product of an airline’s commitment to using operational excellence technology and techniques, he explains.

And even if airlines don’t buy into his operational excellence philosophy, Baiada says that airlines could add positive flight tracking capabilities at very low cost simply by learning to use the automated data reporting capabilities already onboard most of their international aircraft.